“You might hear her yelling,” Otto said with a laugh of his infant daughter during a phone interview May 23. “She’s been making all kinds of noise. That’s been the greatest thing ever so far has been welcoming Ava Katherine into the world. This week she’ll be 9 months old and she’s almost walking already, which is incredible. She’s changed our lives in ways that we never would have expected, for sure. I’m really thankful to be a dad. In fact, it’s been something I was terrified of, but now I’m really glad we did it.”

Otto said Ava has been to a few of his shows and has enjoyed them, but has not yet made it on the tour bus with him for any extended trips.

A recent extended trip Otto is quite proud of is an eight-day USO tour to Kuwait and Iraq where he visited with and entertained our troops.

“I’ve been wanting to go do this USO tour for quite a while,” Otto said, adding that he comes from a military background.

“My dad being a drill sergeant, my grandpa was a Korean War vet, and I was in the Navy myself,” he said. “When the opportunity came up, I kind of jumped at it. It was something that I was asking to do and said, you know, I’d love to go over and see the men and women that are over there and say ‘thank you’ ‘cause, oftentimes, the job is very thankless, and I can imagine being in the desert for months at a time and a year at a time. You need something to keep you busy and someone to say ‘thank you’ once in a while.”

Otto went on the tour with his good friend Shannon Lawson as his guitar player and background vocalist and also Otto’s bass player Rob Bureton.

“It was awesome, man,” Otto said humbly. “One of the most interesting experiences of my life. I got to see Iraq – which you only hear about and see on the news. To actually get those experiences and be there on the ground and talk to those guys is an amazing experience.”

Of course, reaction to his latest charting single, “Soldiers and Jesus,” hit very close to home for Otto on the tour.

“I had some guys come up to me afterwards with tears in their eyes saying what the song meant to them,” Otto said. “To have a battle-hardened soldier come up to you and have tears and talk about their family and that kind of thing to you is moving.”

Otto said the reason he wrote the song in the first place was for soldiers and their families.

“It was such an emotional thing for me to hear those stories,” he said. “It was something that made me really proud.”

Moving into the summer months, Otto is looking forward to getting out on the road and playing at places like Winstock, as well as county and state fairs, and other outdoor venues.

“I’m basically trying to stay home during the week and write songs for an upcoming record, and also to just be dad for a little while,” Otto said. “It’s a little bit more slowed down this year, which is kind of nice because we’d been hitting the road so hard. It’s good to just be doing weekends for a little while.”

If Otto’s fans have been looking for new music from the singer, who parted ways with his record label, Warner Bros. Records, this spring, they just may be in luck.

“My buddy Jaron Lowenstein from Jaron and the Long Road to Love has been putting out music just by himself online and getting some really great reaction to it,” Otto said. “He’s a good friend of ours and we’ve been talking to him a little bit about some of his strategies and some of the things he’s doing and I might put a few things out before we land with a record label, just for fun, and to keep fans interested and know what I’m doing.”

Speaking of landing a record deal, Otto said he has two different labels he is presently speaking with and a few others that also want to speak with him.

“I’m trying to decide what the right decision is,” Otto admitted. “I think one of the things that I’ve known about being in the music business, or learned about being in the music business, is having a record deal is great, but having the right record deal is the main thing that you want to focus on.”

Otto, known for hits like “Just Got Started Loving You,” and “Groovy Little Summer Song,” said making some “really smart decisions” in the next couple months on where he finds a record label home, and having great music when that decision is made are his priorities.

“The music is kind of settled. We know what kind of music we’re making,” Otto said. “There’s not going to be a lot of changes there. We’re going to keep on doing what we’ve been doing and basically find the right partners.”

Some partners in his earlier years in the country music industry included people like John Rich and Big Kenny of Big and Rich, Gretchen Wilson, and other members of the MuzikMafia, which Otto was part of.

Otto said that when the MuzikMafia began, people didn’t have a lot going on, but now that artists have developed successful careers, the Mafia is not able to get together a lot anymore.

“The MuzikMafia hasn’t done a real show with everybody in a long, long time, which is unfortunate, but everybody’s schedules are so busy with John Rich just winning the Apprentice and then Big and Rich are going out this summer on the road with Gretchen Wilson and they’ve got their thing happening there,” Otto said. “Just to get everybody in the same room with the same schedule is almost impossible. It doesn’t lend itself to being the same kind of thing it was. When we were doing the MuzikMafia, none of us had much going on. We were out on a Tuesday night basically drinkin’ and playing music and raisin’ hell, and those opportunities don’t present themselves like they used to.”

One opportunity that did present itself to Otto that he was honored to be part of was a recent tribute project to Waylon Jennings, who was Winstock’s first headliner in 1994. Otto did his version of the Jennings’ hit “Don’t You Think This Outlaw Bit’s Done Got Out Of Hand.”

“The Outlaw movement is what interested me as a kid in country music,” Otto explained. “I was listening to rock and roll and, whatever my friends were listening to in school, I was listening to.”

However, when he heard people like Hank Williams Jr., Willie Nelson, and Jennings, it changed his direction in life.

“I decided I want to play country music for a living,” he said, “so when the opportunity came up with Shooter (Jennings) and his mom (Jessi Colter) to actually work on this project, I was completely honored to have the opportunity to sing your hero’s songs on a tribute record to him is a pretty amazing thing. I hope I did that song justice – it’s one of my favorites of his.”

“He did this just right,” Colter said in a news release. “James really did this with a punch. I’m very excited about his cut on this project and very proud of him.”

A chat with Otto wouldn’t be complete without talking about a song he co-wrote that changed his career – “In Color,” which was the song of the year at the 2008 Academy of Country Music Awards and the 2009 Country Music Association Awards. The song also received a Grammy nomination for country song of the year.

“That song is definitely something special,” he said. “It changed my family’s lives in a lot of ways. It’s touched my family in a lot of ways. It was able to do a lot of things for us that we never thought possible, which was great. To get the chance to stand on the stage at the CMAs and the ACMs and accept song of the year is every songwriter’s dream. That’s what you always hope for, and it was just a magical time – something that I’ll never forget.”

Otto co-wrote the song with Jamey Johnson, who sang the hit, and also Lee Thomas Miller.

“I don’t think that we had any idea what we had when we wrote it,” Otto said. “We all thought it was a good song. We were all really excited about it, but you get excited about a lot of songs. I knew it was better than most of the songs that we write, but you never know what’s going to be a hit and what’s not going to be a hit and what’s going to connect with people.”

Otto said he wasn’t even supposed to have been writing with Johnson and Miller that day, but thanks to a songwriting appointment cancellation, he had some time on his hands and called up his buddy Johnson to see what he was up to and if he wanted to get together to write.

“Four hours later, we had ‘In Color.’ It was a life-changer, a game-changer for me,” Otto said, adding that the original idea came from a conversation with Bill Anderson.

“I think that he (Johnson) and Bill Anderson were looking at pictures of the Grand Ole Opry and, basically, he said ‘if you think it was cool here, you should have seen it in color,’ and Jamey thought that was a really great song idea,” Otto said.

The three writers started talking about the different ways to write it and what to talk about, and what would really set the story apart.

“We all started talking about our grandparents and the things they had gone through, and what life was like back then, and those different pieces of our lives and our grandparents’ lives ended up in the song, which is what a great song usually is, is real pieces of your life, real moments that you live through that other people can identify with,” Otto said. “I think that the human experience is, in a lot of ways, it’s very different – we have all these small details that are different, but in large strokes, we’re very much alike, and I think that we write what your own experience is from heartfelt place that other people can identify.”

People will be sure to identify with Otto as he gets things rolling Saturday on the main stage at the Winstock Country Music Festival.

A “lifelong Minnesota Vikings fan,” the Washington state native lived in neighboring North Dakota for about 10 years

“I’m looking forward to coming up and rocking Winstock in a couple weeks,” he said. “It’s going to be a blast. Come on out.”

Otto called from Nashville for a phone interview May 23 in support of his appearance at Winstock.

For more information on Winstock, visit www.winstockfestival.com, or call 888-946-7865.

For more information on James Otto visit www.jamesotto.com.

Ryan Gueningsman is at ryan@heraldjournal.com.